Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Knowmadics; United States; On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Knowmadics is seeking a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to design, automate, secure, and manage environments used for building, validating, releasing, and demonstrating our space and defense platform. You will own internal development, QA/RC, and demonstration infrastructure, enabling repeatable environments and durable engineering decisions.

You will partner with product and engineering teams to translate requirements into infrastructure designs, code, and release workflows, ensuring safe

Qualifications

• 7+ years of infrastructure-related experience (infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps or related).
• Experience designing and maintaining infrastructure as code, and controlled change promotion.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop dependable development, QA/RC, and demonstration environments.
• Build isolated QA/RC environments for regression testing and upgrade validation.
• Create secure, repeatable demonstration environments for customer demos and reviews.
• Design, implement, and maintain multi-platform infrastructure-as-code modules and environment definitions.
• Establish observability, runbooks, and release-promotion workflows for controlled deployments.

Skills

Infrastructure engineering

Platform engineering

Site reliability engineering

DevOps

DevSecOps

Cloud engineering

Education

High School Diploma

Tools

Linux

Kubernetes

CI/CD / GitOps

Infrastructure as Code

Job description

The Senior Infrastructure Engineer will lead the design, automation, security, and lifecycle management of the environments used to build, integrate, validate, release, and demonstrate our next-generation space and critical infrastructure defense platform. The role will own internal development, quality-assurance (QA)/release-candidate (RC), and demonstration infrastructure, including repeatable environments that may support future business-development demonstrations.

Working closely with Product, platform/backend engineers, frontend engineers, machine learning engineers, security stakeholders, and Business Development, the engineer will translate platform, release, and demonstration requirements into infrastructure design, implementation-ready technical specifications, infrastructure as code, controlled release promotion workflows, observability, runbooks, and durable engineering decision records. They will ensure that data-intensive platform capabilities can be provisioned consistently, tested safely, and demonstrated reliably.

This is a senior, hands-on individual-contributor role with no direct reports. Under the current platform-as-a-product model, customers are intended to deploy and operate production infrastructure through their own DevOps teams. This role will provide reference architectures, deployment artifacts, hardening guidance, documentation, and technical handoff, but is not responsible for routine customer production deployment or ongoing production operations. Production or hosted SaaS operational ownership would be added only if the company establishes a separately scoped service with defined service-level obligations. Success in year one includes standardizing internal environments, improving release repeatability and security, accelerating developer feedback, and enabling dependable demonstrations without creating non-scoped production-support obligations.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Development infrastructure: Provide dependable, developer-friendly environments and shared services that support local and remote development, integration testing, observability, and rapid feedback.
• QA and release-candidate infrastructure: Build and maintain isolated, reproducible QA and RC environments that support regression testing, upgrade validation, release acceptance, rollback rehearsal, and performance characterization before a release is approved.
• Demonstration and business-development environments: Create secure, and repeatable demonstration environments that can be provisioned for internal reviews and customer or partner demonstrations, including controlled access, representative data, and readiness checks.
• Infrastructure as code: Design, implement, review, test, and maintain multi-platform and platform specific reusable infrastructure-as-code and configuration-management modules, environment definitions, state-management practices, and automated provisioning and teardown workflows.
• Container and orchestration platforms: Establish and evolve the workload orchestration, networking, storage, identity, and policy patterns required to run the platform consistently across internal environments.
• CI/CD and GitOps: Design and maintain secure delivery workflows for infrastructure, services, configuration, and data migrations, including automated validation, environment promotion, approvals, deployment status, rollback, and traceability.
• Artifact and release promotion: Define controlled promotion of container images, deployment packages, configuration, and other release artifacts across development, QA, RC, and demo environments, with versioning, compatibility checks, provenance, and retention.
• DevSecOps and software supply chain: Integrate vulnerability scanning, dependency and container assessment, software bills of materials, artifact signing, provenance, policy gates, patch tracking, and remediation workflows into the engineering and release lifecycle.
• Identity, secrets, and infrastructure security: Implement least-privilege access, workload and user identity, secrets and certificate management, network segmentation, secure administrative access, auditability, and environment-specific security controls.
• Observability and reliability: Establish logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, service-health views, and operational objectives for internal and demonstration environments; lead troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, and corrective action for failures within the role's scope.
• Platform service enablement: Provision, configure, and support platform dependencies such as object storage, relational databases, distributed job workers, messaging or event infrastructure, telemetry-processing services, and machine-learning or model-serving dependencies used by engineering teams.
• Disconnected and air-gapped readiness: Build and validate internal reference patterns, offline artifact bundles, registry and package mirroring, installation procedures, and upgrade or rollback workflows that customer DevOps teams can use for disconnected or air-gapped deployments.
• Resilience, capacity, and cost management: Define backup, restore, environment-reset, recovery, performance, resource-governance, and cost-visibility practices appropriate to development, validation, and demonstration usage.
• Documentation and cross-functional delivery: Maintain infrastructure design, technical specifications, decision records, diagrams, environment inventories, release checklists, runbooks, troubleshooting guidance, known limitations, and customer handoff material; communicate risks, dependencies, and readiness to Product and Engineering leads.

Infrastructure Ownership and Technical Leadership

• Internal environment ownership: Own service quality and operational readiness for development, QA, RC, and demonstration infrastructure, including lifecycle, security, observability, change control, and support expectations appropriate to each environment.
• Customer production boundary: Treat customer production infrastructure as customer-owned under the platform-as-a-product operating model; support reference design, documentation, enablement, and handoff without assuming routine deployment, on-call, or operational accountability.
• Technical direction and peer mentorship: Provide infrastructure and DevSecOps guidance to software engineers, review proposed approaches and changes, coach peers on secure delivery and operability, and improve engineering judgment without formal people-management responsibility.
• Design governance and decision records: Contribute to and provide feedback on infrastructure technical specifications, architecture proposals, infrastructure-as-code changes, pipeline designs, security controls, and operational documentation; record context, alternatives, trade-offs, decisions, consequences, and follow-on work.
• Release and demonstration leadership: Represent infrastructure concerns in planning, architecture, release-readiness, security, and demonstration discussions; define readiness criteria, surface unresolved risks, coordinate dependencies, and ensure owners and decisions are documented.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience in infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, site reliability engineering, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a senior individual contributor for multi-environment infrastructure, secure delivery, release engineering, or platform operations.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining infrastructure as code and configuration management, including reusable modules, environment composition, state management, peer review, automated testing, and controlled change promotion.
• Hands-on experience with Linux, production container orchestration, cloud or virtualized infrastructure, networking, storage, ingress, identity, and workload troubleshooting.
• Experience building and operating CI/CD or GitOps workflows for infrastructure and application delivery, including artifact versioning, environment promotion, approvals, rollback, and deployment traceability.
• Practical DevSecOps experience, including vulnerability management, dependency and image scanning, software supply-chain controls, secrets and certificate management, access control, auditability, and security remediation.
• Experience implementing observability and reliability practices using logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, health checks, incident analysis, and corrective-action tracking.
• Experience supporting shared platform dependencies such as object storage, relational databases, distributed workers, messaging systems, caches, or machine-learning infrastructure in development and test environments.
• Demonstrated ability to translate product, engineering, release, and demonstration needs into infrastructure architecture, implementation-ready technical specifications, engineering decision records, and maintainable operational documentation.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain trade-offs, coordinate work across engineering disciplines, communicate risk and readiness, and operate autonomously within defined ownership boundaries.
• Experience establishing environment lifecycle, isolation, access, backup and recovery, capacity, cost-management, and data-handling practices appropriate to development, validation, and demonstration systems.
• Minimum education requirement - High School Diploma. Eligible to obtain a U.S. Security Clearance - U.S. Citizenship required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting data-intensive platforms that use S3-compatible object storage, relational databases, distributed job processing, analytical data stores, telemetry pipelines, or inference model-serving infrastructure.
• Experience creating reference deployment patterns, installation packages, registries, dependency mirrors, and upgrade workflows for on-premises, disconnected, or air-gapped environments.
• Experience preparing reliable demonstration environments for technical evaluations, customer briefings, business-development activities, or partner integrations, including representative data, controlled access, reset procedures, and rapid troubleshooting.
• Experience with infrastructure hardening and security or compliance frameworks relevant to U.S. Government and defense environments, including DISA Security Technical Implementation Guides or comparable controls.

Working conditions

• Employees may be called upon to participate in in-person meetings, training, demonstrations, or company functions at Knowmadics offices or other designated locations. Travel in support of business operations may also be required, and employees are expected to comply with these obligations as part of their position.
• Candidate should live within driving distance of the following areas: Round Rock, TX.
• Estimated Travel: 0-10%. Occasional support outside normal business hours may be required for release-candidate validation or scheduled demonstrations; routine customer production on-call is not part of the current role scope.

Physical requirements

May include sitting or standing for extended periods, working with computers and technical equipment, and occasionally lifting or moving materials or tools.

Direct reports

None

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.